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Authoritarian populists offer a vision of state. This ideologically fixed imaginary provides an electoral-authoritarian template for how to shape states once in power. Yet not all those called populists are populist. Some are elitist plebeians. They construct themselves as 'the moral elite' above which fights for 'the people' below against 'the corrupt'. I argue that elitist plebeianism contains a distinct vision of government as elected guardianship. Like populists, elitist plebeians advocate extending executive power. Yet they envisage this not as the realization of the people's will, but as the projection of accountability downwards. To them, divisions of power are acceptable as divisions of guardian labour. Rival opinions are not illegitimate, just irrelevant, but opposition is intolerable. Therefore, studies of populist authoritarianism should be revisited. Elitist plebeian visions of state may have been misread as authoritarian populist ones. I examine President Magufuli (Tanzania) as an exemplar and identify other potential elitist plebeians worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many opposition parties in electoral-authoritarian regimes identify as democracy movements. I ask: what ideologies do they publicly express? The first-glance answer is 'democratic ones', but there are many theories of liberal democracy, and they say little about living under or indeed confronting authoritarian regimes. I analyse the public messages of two such democracy movements: Chadema (Tanzania) and the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC, in Zimbabwe). I argue that they each articulate a homegrown vision of democracy in which they adapt democratic theory to make sense of their electoral-authoritarian circumstances. They do so by articulating that theory through the 'populist logic' conceptualized in the discourse-theoretic perspective. I call them anti-authoritarian (and democratic) populisms. Previous research has overlooked the distinctiveness of these ideologies because it has adopted concept configurations which invisibilize them. I argue that there are reasons to expect there to be a wider body of anti-authoritarian populisms articulated by democracy movements in electoral-authoritarian regimes in Africa, and indeed, worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'The elite' in ideational and discursive conceptions of populism has gone ill-defined. This makes conceptions of populism elastic. This article asserts that a discourse should only qualify as populist if it constructs an elite that acts in its collective interests and possesses a majority of power across fields. These criteria narrow the definition of populism and reveals another type of discourse, christened here 'elitist plebeianism'. While populists bifurcate society between 'the people' and 'the elite', elitist plebeians trifurcate society between 'the common people', 'the elite' and a middle stratum. While populists vilify the elite, elitist plebeians heroize it and vilify the middle. In office, populists struggle to reconcile their power and their opposition to the powerful; elitist plebeians do not. This similarity in terms and structure facilitates the movement between populist and elitist plebeian discourses. That makes elitist plebeianism a ready-made script for so-called 'populists in power.' Tanzania provides proof of concept. Tanzania's opposition constructed Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) as a corrupt establishment. Magufuli and his party appropriated this discourse but relocated corruption from the elite to the bureaucracy and business, which they portrayed as less powerful than themselves; their discourse is not populist, but elitist plebeian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about how ideologies legitimize authoritarianism. The literature argues that liberation nationalists discursively construct "liberation" as an ongoing struggle and justify their authoritarian rule until its completion. By recurrently postponing liberation, they extend this justification of authoritarianism. Nonetheless, their claim that the nation is part-way through liberation becomes less plausible over time. Liberation nationalism shares a discursive structure with a parallel class of developmental nationalisms. I analyse the ideology of President Magufuli and CCM in Tanzania. Instead of claiming that the nation is mid-transformation, they constructed the status quo as a corrupt deviation from a past order: "Nyerere's Tanzania". They conceived of this past order as a nation dedicated to industrial development which would lead to a transformed future. They advocated rupture with the present, the restoration of the past and the resumption of this transformative journey. Restorationism relieves liberation and developmental nationalisms of the rising rhetorical challenge of claiming that the nation has been on a transformative path since liberation. Therefore, Magufuli and CCM developed a variant upon liberation and developmental nationalisms, which also justifies authoritarianism. Unlike them, it remains rhetorically viable as the moment of liberation or development becomes distant. I call it restorationist developmental nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]